[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #3406: Use HTML4 instead of XHTML1

[WordPress Trac]

#3406: Use HTML4 instead of XHTML1
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 Reporter:  TedNelson  |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  defect     |       Status:  closed   
 Priority:  normal     |    Milestone:           
Component:  Template   |      Version:           
 Severity:  normal     |   Resolution:  wontfix  
 Keywords:             |  
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Comment (by benjaminhawkeslewis):

 Viper007Bond:

 A couple points about this. First, XHTML conformance is not a matter of
 mere validity and, second, I suspect Lachlan regards XHTML 1.0 served as
 text/html as tag soup since it has no specified handling beyond browsers
 copying each others’ error recovery (see RFC 2854).

 I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that
 [http://www.viper007bond.com www.viper007bond.com] is one of your
 WordPress sites? One of the things I’ve learned when dealing with  tag
 soup systems is to never judging a site’s validity by its homepage. And
 sure enough, if we visit your
 [http://www.viper007bond.com/archives/2006/11/19/casino-royale/"
 penultimate post] we find it fails validation with two errors. If you were
 serving that page as application/xhtml+xml, so that Firefox used its XHTML
 parser rather than its tag soup parser, you’d see a yellow screen of death
 instead of your page because your tags are mismatched.

 It doesn’t reflect especially poorly on you that this happens (and I don’t
 claim to be any paragon of marking up myself). It’s a natural consequence
 of the fact that WordPress is not designed from the ground-up to emit
 valid XHTML, but instead to belt out broken markup that mostly renders
 okay thanks to browsers’ forgiving error handling.

 JeremyVisser:

 Most (if not all) WordPress blogs would break very visibly, just like
 Viper007Bond’s, if they were served as application/xhtml+xml, forcing
 browsers to use XML parsing rather than tag soup parsing. Indeed our
 ability to serve XHTML as text/html at all depends on browsers being
 “crappy” and “non-standards-compliant”, since if they had complied with
 the HTML specification they would interpret minimized XHTML tags ending />
 as really ending at the / and print the > as part of the text content, due
 the SGML declaration for HTML 4.

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3406#comment:12>
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